Laptop speakers inexplicably stopped working

[sircuddles]

I consider myself a pretty computer savvy guy, but I am at a complete loss here. My mom has a laptop that she uses for basically Facebook and has had it for a while. We use it via HDMI to watch movies on the living room TV pretty often.

When running Twitch streams in Source, it tends to go into hibernation randomly. Checking RealTemp confirmed my suspicions that it's overheating (lol) and shutting off to prevent problems. Today I fiddled with some settings (trying to only show TV display instead of duplicating, and changing power profile in the graphic options).

Anyways, everything was fine, after a while I left. My mom went back on the laptop, and there was no sound. She said the icon in the volume options (i.e the active device) is different, I am not sure if it is or isn't. I tried a system restore, scanned everything, muted/unmuted via function keys, changing enhancement options, testing, disabling re-enabling, everything I can think of. In Device Manager there are no other audio devices or unknown devices listed. I've rolled back the driver, I even did a System Restore from a few days ago. Nothing weird has been installed recently.

If I plug it into HDMI, audio comes through the TV no problem. Unplug it, nothing. I am at a complete loss on why audio would stop out of absolutely nowhere, for no reason. Anyone have any ideas?

 

[wdeydwondrer]

Cleaned out the drivers and reinstalled them? Have seen on board audio ports die on occasion (as well as lan ports), never really seems to be a reason either.

If you're overheating though, you may want to do a tear down and clean that poor thing.

 

[sircuddles]

Well of course after I make this post, I hand the laptop back to my mom, she reboots it and the speakers work (yes I rebooted many times).

So... who knows what the hell the problem was.

 

[Phyltre]

Running the Windows 10 preview on a few laptops, I have seen audio input and output fail completely, persisting across reboots. A day or two later, it just either starts or stops working again. No real rhyme or reason. Of course, in my case I know it's my fault because I'm running a preview OS on portable hardware.